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India, New Delhi
1 Level
737 Review
40 Karma

Review on Roku Premiere - High-Quality Streaming with HDR in HD and 4K UHD by John Lewis

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Cut the rope! Roku has a great user interface for Tableau. Wired Ethernet for live TV is highly recommended.

(by Papa in Co.) Summary: Wow. We're about to "cut the cord" and we bought three of these (one for each TV) and paired them with a Tablo OTA DVR for live TV. What an amazing combination. The only confusion was the TV streaming over Wi-Fi. See below for details. Detail: After installing Tablo, I installed three Roku devices. I have two of them and one connected via WiFi. Rokus works great and the Rokus tablo interface is fantastic. You can read my Tablo review for more details on this device, but I found that Roku actually makes a real whole home with the Tablo DVR. That means you can watch a tablo entry on Roku in one room, stop that playback, switch to another room, and if you select the same tablo entry from another Roku, it will pick up where you left off . Nice feature and what I was looking for as I have it with my current DVR setup which I will be cutting the cable off of soon. Roku! Setting up Netflix and Revain streaming was easy (keep your laptop with you!). Even one of our local TV stations has a Roku channel. The whole family appreciates that we now have ONE consistent interface for all our TVs. We used to use our BluRay players to stream, so every TV had a different (crappy) user interface for every streaming service. Now all rooms have a great interface that's light years ahead of those clunky BluRay streaming interfaces. The only problem I had was that Tablo couldn't stream live TV to Roku at 1080 over Wi-Fi without occasional buffering. It could have been my WiFi network, but it wasn't the case when using a wired connection to Roku. The Tablo/Roku combo had no problem playing Tablo recordings over Wi-Fi. I've only seen this issue with live streaming, and it was easy to fix with a wired ethernet connection. Geek Note: My router no longer has room for all three Rokus, so I'm adding a 1GB network switch. The Tablo and three Rokus are hardwired to this switch, and the Wi-Fi internet router plugs into the side. This allows Rokus to communicate with Tablo without touching my internet or WiFi device. To stream internet content, the Roku Switch switches to the internet router. However, LiveTV traffic is completely isolated from Internet and Wi-Fi traffic, allowing you to stream Live TV in Full HD without affecting other Internet/Wi-Fi traffic. If you cut the cord, you need to make sure you have a good network at home to support live TV this way. It doesn't matter how fast your internet connection is when streaming from Tablo to Roku. All that matters is the quality of your home Ethernet network.

Pros
  • Best in Niche
Cons
  • Poorly Thought Out